Emotions and pre-service teachers’ motivation to teach the context of returning wolves

Abstract

Biodiversity issues can fruitfully be adopted as contexts of Education for Sustainable Development, as they involve ecological, economic and social dimensions. But as these contexts are demanding to teach, we need to know more about motivational factors to determine how teacher education should be conducted to lead to motivated teachers. To study this, we employed a quantitative paper-and-pencil questionnaire and surveyed 120 pre-service biology teachers (Mage = 23.2 years, SD = 3.3) based on the model of goal-directed behavior. Enjoyment towards teaching the topic was more frequently reported than fear and anger. The anticipated enjoyment correlated positively and anger negatively with the desires to teach. In a structural equation model, attitudes, enjoyment and perceived behavioral control significantly predicted the desires to teach and should therefore be fostered in environmental teacher education. Furthermore, we found an interesting connection between PBC and enjoyment, which is further discussed in the paper.